The second installment in a fantasy trilogy from a Hugo Award–winning author, this novel offers an adventure through space and time as Eddie Raven tries to outrun the dark forces pursuing him.
Her name is Lisa, and ever since Eddie Raven hooked up with her, strange things keep happening.
How strange? Lisa can take on any role at a moment’s notice. She’s Maid Marian. She’s Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. In an instant, she can become the sexy, gum-chewing secretary to his hard-boiled detective. She can even become Doc Holliday’s frontier lady, Big Nose Kate.
But who is she really? That’s something Eddie’s got to find out before this series of strange adventures, which began in The Master of Dreams, overtakes him. And if Lisa’s not enough of a problem, there’s also the powerful creature who claims to be the chief demon in hell, who seems convinced that he, Eddie, and Lisa are on the same side.
Is Eddie being told the truth? He’d better decide quickly, because one thing is clear: he’s running out of time.
Opening a new fantasy trilogy from Hugo Award winner Mike Resnick, this novel offers an adventure through space and time as Eddie Raven tries to outrun the dark forces pursuing him.
Eddie Raven isn't quite sure what's happening to him-and he's in a race to find out before it kills him.
His adventures begin with a shooting in a very strange shop in Manhattan-but soon he finds himself the owner of a very familiar bar in Casablanca. By the time he adjusts to that reality, he's suddenly become one of several undersized people helping a young woman search for a wizard. And after confronting the wizard, he somehow finds himself in Camelot.
But as he rushes to solve the mystery of his many appearances, a larger threat looms. Because someone or something is stalking him through time and space with deadly intent.
He killed 11 million men in the death camps of Pilor IX during the brief reign of the mad Emperor Justacious. He killed 17 million men on Boriga II in a manner that made the gas ovens of ancient Earth and its Reich seem compassionate. He killed 5 million women and children on New Rhodesia. He killed 3,017 men on Cambria III, each in a different way. He invented torture devices that even Spica VI, which was in revolt against the Republic, would not use.
No photograph, holograph, or videodisc of him is known to exist. He has never been fingerprinted. There is no voice or retina identification pattern on him in any computer. He has no bank account on any world, no financial or property holdings that anyone has been able to trace. His planet of origin is unknown. Many men have served him; all but seven are dead, and none of those seven have ever seen him.
He is a fugitive.
His name is Conrad Bland and he is, for the moment, safe. But someone has sent an assassin to find him—and end him.
Chief Detective John Sable is caught between his badge and his conscience as the two most famous executioners of all time prepare to do battle in his territory.
“Resnick has a beautiful style, his characterizations are well handled and his descriptions vivid. The situations his characters face are exciting and clearly presented.”—Martha Bartter, author of The Utopian Fantastic, on Birthright
An epic novel of human expansion across the stars
This brilliant science fiction novel constructs a blueprint of mankind's history-social, political, economic, scientific, and religious-for the next eighteen thousand years. Through a series of adventures, it illustrates clear, focused ideas about our birthright and our destiny.
Since this 1982 debut, Mike Resnick has emerged as one of the most honored science fiction authors of his time, picking up forty-odd Hugo and Nebula nominations and awards. He has set twenty-five novels and a novella in the future that was outlined in this book. Now, those who missed it the first time around can catch up on this mind-boggling, all-encompassing precedent to Resnick's fiction.
"Birthright is a kaleidoscope image of humanity's strengths and weaknesses, a patchwork quilt of vivid assumptions on just what being human is all about. And at the heart of that question are answers which reveal the seeds of humanity's ultimate downfall."-Raymond E. Feist
